More Stimulus Needed to Employ College, High School Grads

This editorial from the New York Times lays it out plain and simple: until we invest more in creating jobs through the government, our economy is going to be weak. College graduates need a place to get a job, and we need to create the jobs with the government’s help.

3 thoughts on “More Stimulus Needed to Employ College, High School Grads”

Simple solutions to complex problems usually create more complex problems. So-called “stimulus” stimulates nothing but making a bad situation worse. Government spending by takig money either sucks money from the economy, and giving it away with the lack of efficiency so typical of government, is wastefu and applys a faulty bandaid to a gaping wound. Government can print more money and give it away, but this devalues the money already in the economy, and things cost more, and nothing is accomplished but inflation and devaluation of money. In the end, if government hires this latest crop of graduates, and does as government usually does, create pointless and useless “jobs,” the scenario is repeated next year with the new crop of graduates, and the next year and next year after that.

one can demonstrate that the lack of “jobs” for graduates is not as the Times suggest, that there are no private sector jobs for a skilled workforce, but there is a real lack of skills to meet the needs of employers who are hiring. Skilled foreign workers enter the economy simply because they are skilled.

The current administration is certainly attempting to win the votes of the unemployed graduates by “demanding” more national debt to give money to others, be they unemployed graduates or any other special interest group that votes. This is really politics as usual, not a sensible approach to issues related to education or employment. failed governments alway pander and promises of bread are as old as Rome. The real issues are an exploding job searching population with limited skills, competing for a constrained job market limited by poor government and competing foreign labor with needed skills.

I agree with Don above only to the extent that these are indeed complex problems, but totally disagree with his premise that the government should do nothing to help unemployed youth this summer. That would in effect leave many of them stranded with nothing to do and some would get into mischief. And foreign workers are hired primarily because they are cheaper! Another thing the government could do is to limit work visas to the few cases where really needed and enforce immigration laws to help employment here instead of allowing employers to reduce wages and benefits, thus reducing the purchasing power of American workers. The Republicans in Congress are clearly doing everything they can do accomplish this in the hopes of replacing Obama because so many workers are hurting, a strategy that is apparently succeeding!

I suggest that the current hiring of foreign workers in most if not all technical industries, or the academic world, or the management world, are not hired because they are cheaper, but because they are prepared to work where jobs exist. They did not major in Physical Education, Home Economics, or Literary Criticism at their colleges. The core of the problem is very deep, much too complex for politicians to manage. It will not matter how many Summer paychecks for nothing substantive “government” issues for several reasons. Perhaps the most significant of these is that there will be a new crop of graduates next Summer, and every Summer after that, and there will have been no solution for the previous Summer crop and every crop before that. Government has a miserable record of substantive and required change.